In Part I of our three-part interview with the prolific videogame journalist Geoff Keighley, he revealed the genesis of his recently launched online roundtable show, "Bonus Round," and provided some insights into how he chooses his guests. Here in Part II, he discusses how he started covering games at the tender age of 13, why he's still at it 15 years later, and how he's not all that different from Microsoft corporate vice-president Peter Moore and Nintendo president Satoru Iwata.

You've written for Entertainment Weekly, Business 2.0 , EGM and Gamespot. You've hosted shows for G4, Electric Playground, Spike TV and GameTrailers. You're one of the founders of the Game Critics Association. If Howard Stern can call himself the King of All Media, doesn't your resume make you the Prince of All Media?

[Laughs.] I don't know how to answer that. Who's my Baba Booey?

More seriously, though; it's interesting that enthusiast magazines were once the only place where you could find games being covered, with occasional stuff on TV. Now with the rise of blogs, podcasts and online video programming like The 1UP Show, there are people filling up multiple silos. But you seem to have the most silos. You're covering games in numerous ways. And you've been covering games since you were 13 years old. Do your multiple outlets and years of perspective give you an advantage? Does it distinguish you from some of the other people who cover games?

It's certainly conscious on my part that I try to expand into other media, in part because it's exciting to me. When I was 13, I was writing previews for a magazine from my bedroom in Toronto. Maybe in part because of the amount of time I've spent writing about games, doing the same thing again and again doesn't keep me interested. Luckily, it's really been pretty synergistic in that as I've wanted to explore new things, it seems there are new opportunities out there.

Doing the print stuff was big. I was one of the first guys to do online stuff with Gamespot back in the mid-'90s. What I try to do is look at what's the best content to put on each medium. So when I did online, I did much longer stories, these "Behind the Games" and "Final Hours" stories, because that was one of the benefits of online--you had an unlimited amount of space.

How did you get into television?

I give a lot of credit to Victor Lucas, who's really sort of the forefather of videogame TV. He got me involved in his show, "Electric Playground," back in 2002. I got exposed to TV that way. You look at online video and the revolution that's happening there, I definitely wanted to be part of that. I mean, even just the other night, I was thinking "Now the next big thing is HD content." Even with all these game systems being HD, there are no TV networks doing videogame shows in HD. There's one network, GamePlay HD, that's part of Rainbow Media, that's trying some stuff. But I'm already thinking about that now, and freaking out, and saying "Well, how can I get ahead of doing something in HD?" because everyone's going to want to see videogame programming in HD.

So yeah, I guess it's somewhat calculated on my part. But it's really just what's interesting to me, to be able to cover games in many different ways, to play a game and cover it on "Game Head," and then write about it in Entertainment Weekly, maybe mention it on "Bonus Round." It's what keeps me interested in staying in the business, that there are always new opportunities to explore.

There's a tendency for gamers just to talk to gamers and be somewhat insular in their coverage. I sort of felt that after I graduated from college. I'd been writing for all these enthusiast magazines; that was all well and fine, and I enjoyed that. But a lot of my friends, my sister and other people in my family--no one really understood games. Even in academic circles, no one was really looking at it in a particularly positive light. So I said, if I continue on with this industry post-college, it would be great to do some things that are more mainstream, broader, that help explain the business to a wider audience.

Doing stuff in Entertainment Weekly was very gratifying. Covering the business side in Business 2.0 was really interesting to me. "Game Head" is a great example of doing something for a mainstream network, which I think just broadens the base for the gaming industry. So Peter Moore may try and release Viva Pinata to do that, and I have a few other ways that I try to accomplish the same goal. [Laughs.]

Being 13, writing previews from your bedroom and getting into games journalism that way--Esquire's Chuck Klosterman wrote that contentious article asking, "Where's the Lester Bangs of videogame journalism?" Maybe you're the Cameron Crowe of videogames.

[Laughs.] Yeah, everyone always makes that comparison to "Almost Famous." I was 15 and hanging out with Will Wright in his office. That's been fun, to see the industry grow up with me. I think part of why I've stayed in the business is that as I was going through high school and college, I was doing a lot of other things. It was fun to do some gaming stuff on the side, but I was never really trying to turn it into a career when I was 17, but just letting the business mature and grow and letting me watch it slowly evolve over the years.

After college, I was toying with going to law school. I wasn't necessarily sure that I was going to turn what I had done during the college years into a career. But it picked up a lot of steam in 2001 and 2002 and even now, it seems that there's something new and something exciting. I'm just wrapping up a documentary series for Discovery that's going to air in the spring, which I'm really excited about. There are a lot of opportunities, and everything I'm doing I just hope adds something to the canon of videogame journalism.

People, when they talk about "Who's the Lester Bangs of videogames," they're still thinking 30 years ago, in a print world, about who's going to write these incredibly insightful, deep commentary pieces in print. I think that would be great if that happened, but now, we're living in a high-tech, digital, video-based world, and videogames are absolutely at the bleeding edge of that. So the ways that we need to cover it have to be more multimedia focused. "Bonus Round," I'm sure it would be fine in a print magazine, to have a six-page roundtable conversation. And in some ways I'm shocked that the videogame magazines don't do that. I remember Next-Generation [magazine] used to do that kind of stuff that ten years ago. It's sort of self-serving, but I feel that something like "Bonus Round" is best served up online in a video form. So that's the way I do it. It's just great that a site like GameTrailers has the space and the bandwidth and the interest in putting together a show like that, which is perfectly suited for that medium.

Having written for Entertainment Weekly and Business 2.0, what are the challenges and rewards of covering videogames in mainstream outlets?

That's the stuff that really allowed me to justify to myself staying involved in the business post-college. I get a lot of personal satisfaction out of writing a six- or eight-page feature in Business 2.0, or writing a profile of Will Wright for Entertainment Weekly. I'd be lying if I didn't say that the writing for the print mags is more intellectually stimulating than a lot of the stuff I've done on TV. That's no slight against television; it's just more edifying to me to write print articles--I find it more of a challenge. It's more of a personal journey, writing a story, as opposed to more of a team effort to create television. They're just different. People always say to me now, "Are you just going to go off and host TV shows and not write anymore articles?" Absolutely not. I really enjoy the mix. I enjoy writing the back page column for OXM [Official Xbox Magazine] every month.

The way I've developed my career, it now has three pillars to it, or three legs of a stool: the mainstream work, the enthusiast work and the business work. I've always tried to develop all three angles. So even though I'm writing for Business 2.0, I'm still doing a column for OXM or doing a story for EGM [Electronic Gaming Monthly], and then I also do the TV stuff. So they're all really different, and I can't ever imagine focusing more on one more than the other.

At some point, I hope the line between enthusiast and mainstream writing and coverage of the business will blur a bit. Because I look at a show like "Game Head," and even though it appeals to a mainstream audience and it rates well on Spike, it's a pretty hardcore show in terms of the guests that we've had on. We've been lucky enough to have you join us, we've had other people like Andy McNamara from Game Informer, and we've had lots of game developers on. When people think of mainstream coverage of games, they automatically assume that it has to suck. What I've tried to prove is that you can move over from an enthusiast background, cover games in the mainstream in an intelligent way and open people's eyes to the fact that you can cover games in mainstream outlets in a smart, insightful way. If you do that, hopefully you help grow the business.